Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zaheregiu

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Wifione _.......^{Leave a message} 07:10, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Zaheregiu

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I can't decide what is more problematic about this article. It could be the fact that it uses a native Romanian spelling for a Turkish word, so obscure a word that I can't even determine its actual spelling (zahercu?). It could be that it merely refers to food merchants, no particular reason why these food merchants are more relevant than others on the "international stage". It could also be that the term itself is antiquated (and was colloquial) even in Romanian. The encyclopedic dictionary that I use for quick reference has entries on other words from the Ottoman era from seimeni and agă, to the utterly blurry seraschier, and includes an entry on the generic term, zaherea ("a generic term for provisions [...] that the Romanian lands were obliged to furnish to the Ottoman armies"). But zaheregiu is absent. Google searches for zaheregiu and the plural zaheregii give just about no results. Some other significant problems: the article was created exclusively to fill a red link in a couple of articles from the Filotti family cruft, all of which are now deleted; incidentally, like those articles, it uses a very questionable reference that is quite possible self-published, and is certainly not a reliable source (the author is a raving amateur). Dahn (talk) 02:08, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions. —Dahn (talk) 03:12, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Romania-related deletion discussions. —Dahn (talk) 03:12, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Turkey-related deletion discussions. —Dahn (talk) 03:12, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

transwiki at the least. It would seem to me that this is a dictdef at the very least, and possibly a hoax? I can't tell either. I did some source investigation as well and I can't make heads or tails of it. I can't determine if this term EXISTS from english-language sources. Can we ask someone that is a native speaker to give us some guidance? I'll ask around. HominidMachinae (talk) 04:45, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Basically it's just a dictionary definition for a Romanian word that may or may not exist. It's useless even for Wiktionary. Hans Adler 09:28, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Just an Ottoman Turkish word for grain dealer [1] [2] written according to Romanian phonetic rules. If ever used in an article, a parenthetical explanation would suffice.Anonimu (talk) 11:44, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So it's zahireci in the Turkish? At long last, the literate spelling. Thank you, Anonimu. Dahn (talk) 11:47, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've requested the input of champmasters (talk · contribs), who is an expert in the Turkish language. Even though it seems fairly definitive, a cherry on top would be great. bahamut0013^words _deeds 12:08, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I got this response via email:

“

In looking at that word (Zaheregiu) as it's spelled in the article, something caught my eye. It hasn't any Turkish-language meaning, at all - even if you break it into syllables (eg. Zaher-egiu) to form a combined word. (Their are Turkish words that are similar in looks, but not similar enough to be useful.) And... it simply isn't logical that a group of Ottoman Age 'Balkan grain traders' would have a meaningless Turkish name. So, I'll bet you a fiver that (Zaheregiu) is slightly misspelled.

I'll investigate further... but for now just consider one of a few credible possibilities. Turks finally began [giving themselves "proper" western-like surnames], often attaching 'oglu' (meaning 'the son of') at the end an heroic name to create a surname for themselves. Now, observe the last 4 letters of the name in question (-egiu). They could have easily been mis-copied when they were taken from the original document (perhaps when they were manually extracted, or when they were spelled-checked, or when the were OCR-ed). Mebbe those letters ought to be 'oglu' instead of 'egiu'...The correct o-letter could have become a similarly-shaped incorrect e-letter during copy/extraction...And so on... Of those 4 letters, I suspect that...only the g and the u-letters made it through cleanly, from the source document. And perhaps, the h-letter in 'Zaher' (a word which has *no* meaning in Turkish) should be an f-letter -- resulting in 'Zafer' which means an heroic 'Victory'. And, combining, you get Zaferoglu... Son(s) of Victory...which is still a very common surname in Turkey.

There are a couple of other misspelling possibilities that I also need to consider -- such as Zaferrengi, Zafiroglu, etc.

”

So it seems like there is nothing about the article that lends itself to being credible. bahamut0013^words _deeds 12:44, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As pointed by Anonimu above, the term does have a marginal existence in Romanian, and originates with a marginal Turkish term. The problem here is that, although the Romanian term is a borrowing of a Turkish, the spelling differs by so much that it's easy to see why champmasters was unable to track down any reference to it: both languages have phonetic modern spellings, but those spellings are now utterly unfamiliar to each other. To begin with, I myself could tell that zaheregiu was quite possibly a combination of zaherea ("[army] supplies") - which is somewhat attested as a Romanian word - and the suffix -giu. The suffix itself is the Turkish -cu or -ci (gi in Romanian is pronounced dj or dji), and survives in common Romanian words, so much so that it has even been adapted into jocular terms (scandalagiu - a scandal-maker). I sourced some of this info here. So I knew that zaheregiu was a hamfisted attempt to render a Turkish word through the Romanian, and that the root word sounded something like zaherecu - Anonimu clarified that the root word is zahereci or zahireci.

The above is just to help sort out the additional confusion, for which I am partly responsible. That said, I still don't see any reason why this obsolete and marginal term should have its own article, let alone why it should be an entry under its Romanian spelling. Dahn (talk) 13:13, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.